So, after a dreary autumn and winter of parting and silence, Elsley found himself the next season invited to Eaton Square; there the mischief, if mischief it was, was done; and Elsley and Lucia started in life upon two hundred a year.  He had inherited some fifty of his own; she had about a hundred and fifty, which, indeed, was not yet her own by right; but little Scoutbush (who was her sole surviving guardian) behaved on the whole very well for a young gentleman of twenty-two, in a state of fury and astonishment.  The old Lord had, wisely enough, settled in his will that Lucia was to enjoy the interest of her fortune from the time that she came out, provided she did not marry without her guardian’s leave; and Scoutbush, to avoid esclandre and misery, thought it as well to waive the proviso, and paid her her dividends as usual.

But how had she contrived to marry at all without his leave?  That is an ugly question.  I will not say that she had told a falsehood, or that Elsley had forsworn himself when he got the licence:  but certainly both of them were guilty of something very like a white lie, when they declared that Lucia had the consent of her sole surviving guardian, on the strength of an half-angry, half-jesting expression of Scoutbush’s that she might marry whom she chose, provided she did not plague him.  In the first triumph of success and intoxication of wedded bliss, Lucia had written him a saucy letter, reminding him of his permission, and saying that she had taken him at his word:  but her conscience smote her; and Elsley’s smote him likewise; and smote him all the more, because he had been married under a false name, a fact which might have ugly consequences in law which he did not like to contemplate.  To do him justice, he had been half-a-dozen times during his courtship on the point of telling Lucia his real name and history.  Happy for him had he done so, whatever might have been the consequences:  but he wanted moral courage; the hideous sound of Briggs had become horrible to him; and once his foolish heart was frightened away from honesty, just as honesty was on the point of conquering, by old Lady Knockdown’s saying that she could never have married a man with an ugly name, or let Lucia marry one.

“Conceive becoming Mrs. Natty Bumppo, me dear, even for twenty thousand a year.  If you could summon up courage to do the deed, I couldn’t summon up courage to continue my correspondence with ye.”

Elsley knew that that was a lie; that the old lady would have let her marry the most triumphant snob in England, if he had half that income:  but unfortunately Lucia capped her aunt’s nonsense with “There is no fear of my ever marrying any one who has not a graceful name,” and a look at Vavasour, which said—­“And you have one, and therefore I—­” For the matter had then been settled between them.  This was too much for his vanity, and too much, also, for his fears of losing Lucia by confessing the truth.  So Elsley went